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Actuality, indexicality, and knowledge

  • Wayne A. Davis

    Wayne A. Davis, Professor Emeritus, Philosophy Department. Georgetown University. Author of An Introduction to Logic (Prentice-Hall, 1986), Implicature (Cambridge, 1998), Meaning, Expression, and Thought (Cambridge, 2003), Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference (Oxford 2005), Irregular Negations and Idioms: Beyond Implicature and Explicature Theories (Springer 2016), Indexical Meaning and Concepts (in preparation), and articles on philosophy of language, philosophical psychology, philosophy of science, and epistemology. Editor of Philosophical Studies.

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Abstract

After summarizing linguistic evidence against the thesis that actuality terms are indexical, I examine conceptual and epistemological arguments offered in favor of an indexical analysis. I argue that an indexical semantics provides no explanation of how we know what is actually the case, and no grounds for postulating a contingent a priori. Truth in every context, or in every model, does not imply knowledge of the fact a sentence expresses nor how we know it if we do. Moreover, descriptive analyses also predict that ‘I exist in the actual world’ and instances of ‘p ≡ Actually p’ are true in every context.


Corresponding author: Wayne A Davis, Department of Philosophy (emeritus), Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA, E-mail:

About the author

Wayne A. Davis

Wayne A. Davis, Professor Emeritus, Philosophy Department. Georgetown University. Author of An Introduction to Logic (Prentice-Hall, 1986), Implicature (Cambridge, 1998), Meaning, Expression, and Thought (Cambridge, 2003), Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference (Oxford 2005), Irregular Negations and Idioms: Beyond Implicature and Explicature Theories (Springer 2016), Indexical Meaning and Concepts (in preparation), and articles on philosophy of language, philosophical psychology, philosophy of science, and epistemology. Editor of Philosophical Studies.

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Published Online: 2024-05-15
Published in Print: 2024-06-25

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